ON July 13, 1985 I was at Wembley Stadium working for the BBC as one of the presenters of its coverage of Live Aid.

It was a hot day. Up in the transparent box suspended from the roof, which was usually occupied on match days by Des Lynam and Terry Venables, it was baking.

Every time Bob Geldof came in the temperature rose even further. On that particular day the garrulous Irishman was running on a supercharged combination of nervous tension, righteous indignation and back pain. All of which made him even harder to placate than usual.

After I climbed into the crow’s nest, they wired me up and told me to sit tight. There was no chance of a comfort break. The nearest lavatory was a day’s ride away. My job was to link, fill, interview the guests great and small, and, at certain specified intervals, tell viewers how they could make a donation to Live Aid.

This being long before digital, when the few people who had credit cards didn’t like the idea of reading out their number over the phone, viewers were first invited to send in their contributions by post, then told they could donate at their local post office and, finally, they were offered the option of picking up the phone.

To make things even more difficult, the BBC was determined that its coverage should not turn into a charity telethon...

Precisely what organiser Bob Geldof wanted it to be.

After Queen had delivered the first show-stopping performance of the day, Geldof discovered that contributions were not coming in as fast as he might have hoped.

So he climbed into our little studio and demanded to make an appeal. In a break between acts I sat next to him and talked him through it.

He made his case as to why people should put hands in their pockets to help the starving.

“Fine,” I said and then, because I knew what order the captions would come up in, I added to camera: “Here’s the address...”

“F*** the address,” interjected Geldof. “Go to the phone number!”

Only one thought went through my mind. It wasn’t, as Billy Connolly had claimed, that at that point we were being watched by 95% of the TV viewers on earth – which would make me the most publicly bad-mouthed person in the history of the world.

It wasn’t that I was bothered by being spoken to sharply by Bob Geldof because that had hap­­pened before. Mainly I thought, “My mother is ­probably watching this and she’ll be embarrassed for me”.

In 1985 there was no procedure in place for dealing with swearing on telly. A TV producer in the obscenity-rich environment of today’s light entertainment asked me the other day how I went about apologising. I searched my memory. I have no recollection of apologising. Why should I? I wasn’t the one who said it.

No producer had ever told me what the procedure was when people swore because they never did. I’m sure that nowadays it’s the first thing they tell you when you start on Blue Peter but in those days we were just genuinely taken aback.

The day carried on. Geldof made other, even more impassioned appeals. I think he thumped his fist on the table at some point. Anyway, the donations came in, the TV audience grew and out there in the world, unbeknown to us in the stadium, the day was already changing from reality to myth.

I first realised the extent of it the following morning when I went to interview Viv Richards at Lords. All the cricketing God wanted to talk about was Live Aid.

He was the first say to me: “What about when he said, ‘Give us your f***ing money,’ then?” I smiled wanly and quietly wondered if that was what Geldof actually said.

In the years that followed I’ve been engaged in that same conversation all over the world. The people who are convinced that Geldof said “Give us your f***ing money” range from those who claim to have watched every second of the broadcast to people not even born at the time.

It was a classic case of a myth getting halfway round the world before the truth could get its trousers on. Millions had watched this incident yet all remembered it wrongly. You can see how religions start.

They had reworked their experience of the day into a cartoon that they could retain in their heads.

Now, 25 years later, comes When Harvey Met Bob, a dramatised take on Live Aid, shown last night on BBC2. I was played by one Mark Huberman. While he had the right amount of animal sexuality to play me, and Wardrobe dug out a faded blue polo shirt just like the one I dug out in 1985, I suspect they did a bit of work around Huberman’s hairline.

They played out the famous scene. The actor playing Bob didn’t say “Give us your f***ing money” or “f*** the address”. He did say “f*** the post office”, which seemed odd.

It won’t change the public perception one bit. Live Aid is the only thing I’ve been involved in that could properly be called famous. Pity I look such a fool.

Five years ago a magazine sent me out to Ethiopia to write about what effect Live Aid had on the people it was intended to benefit. In Tigray Province I talked – through an interpreter – to some subsistence farmers who had been young people at the time. Did Bob Geldof’s work make any difference? The interpreter, an Ethiopian who had spent most of his adult life working the European aid agencies, looked at me and asked: “Who’s Bob Geldof?”

I felt like saying: “He’s the bloke who said ‘Give us your f***ing money’. You must remember.”

3When Harvey Met Bob, screened last night, will be repeated on BBC1, December 31 at 1.35am.